10 Places to Find Free Images Online and Make Your Content More Linkable

... from the Search Engine Journal.

Coding Horror: How To Achieve Ultimate Blog Success In One Easy Step

The Coding Horror is one of my favorite geek blogs. I marvel at how well and how often the author writes about technical minutia in a consistently compelling way. Now he's written a post on how he went from being a nobody to a somebody who claims 100,000 readers a day:

... success takes time-- a lot of time. I'd say a year at minimum. That's the element that weeds out so many impatient people. I wrote this blog for a year in utter obscurity, but I kept at it because I enjoyed it. I made a commitment to myself, under the banner of personal development, and I planned to meet that goal. My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing. Every time I wrote, I learned a little more about the topic, how to research topics effectively, where the best sources of information were. Every time I wrote, I was slightly more plugged in to the rich software development community all around me. Every time I wrote, I'd get a morsel of feedback or comments that I kept rolling up into future posts. Every time I wrote, I tried to write something just the tiniest bit better than I did last time.

E-Media Tidbits: "Blogging Without the Time Sink"

Amy Gahran explains:

It seems to me that the key to blogging efficiently is this: DO NOT treat it like writing an article. That is, make blogging part of your ongoing processes for research, notetaking, and communication.

Depth Reporting is that for me: It's my way of keeping up with what's out there, and if others find what I come across useful too, great. If not, that's OK too, because it was still worthwhile.

Usability expert says write articles, not blog entries

Good writing and good reporting takes time, which is why there's so little of it on blogs, including this one. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen uses some pseudo statistical reasoning to make the case that if you're going to build your reputation online, "Write Articles, Not Blog Postings":

Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.

Infodoodads

I must be self-absorbed, because when I first saw this blog's name I read it as info-dads, when it should be info-doodads. "infodoodads is a blog that reviews and discusses existing and new tools, services, and technology for finding information on the internet. What kind of information? Any kind. The women behind infodoodads love to learn and find information, and every day new tools are being created and unveiled that help people find, sort, and interact with information." I learned about it from The Intelligent Agent blog, which likes it a lot.

Blog Traffic Generation Tips

Daily Blog Tips offers 30 tips for generating blog traffic.

Placeblogger

Placeblogger is a directory of local blogs it calls "placeblogs":

Placeblogs are sometimes called "hyperlocal sites" because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail -- and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term "citizen journalism," or journalism done by non-journalists.

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They're about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

Its collection of Louisville blogs, however, offers little in the way of fresh content. Maybe there's a reason these places haven't attracted much traditional media coverage ...

Explaining FOIA to bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the Freedom of Information Act to bloggers, in the hope they will put it to good use.

Blogs for following the law on the national level

The Indiana Law Blog calls the following "two of the most important new informational tools lawyers now have ... for keeping totally current with law at the national level":

• How Appealing, "The Web's first blog devoted to appellate litigation"
• ScotusBlog, the "Supreme Court of the United States Blog"

The hottest news in the blogosphere

Or so says Tailrank, which promises to find "the best content from thousands of blogs so you don't have to!"

The Freedom of Information Act Blog

Scott A. Hodes, who writes the FOIA Facts column for LLRX.com, has started The FOIA blog. Hodes is a FOIA attorney in Washington D.C.

RSS the Oprah Way

A blog called back in skinny jeans (explanation for that title here) explains  "RSS the Oprah way" :

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?” 

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?